“Try to leave the Earth as a better place than the one found,” in Sidney Sheldon

“Fishermen’s Gain in the Scrambled River,” Popular Adagio

The war in Ukraine, the last of the crises that are shackling, has led to a frenzy of socio-political anxiety with one of the major energy concerns. Energy oligopolies and their political and media cohort are using the current poor situation to launch a campaign of disinformation – and unprecedented manipulation, supported by price increases that are also responsible for them. We are therefore observing that legislation on spatial planning and environmental protection is not complied with, without any shame, or that it is neutralised by provisions that weaken the basic principles. Research, investment and consensus over decades have fallen rapidly. It now appears that the objective is to apply to renewable energies the obsolete centralised energy model of fossil energies, maximising the benefits and applying it in many cases in public land of public ownership. With this model, we eliminate the real advantages of renewables. These advantages are compatible only with the expansion based on distributed generation, managed from the perspective of social progress and with fundamental respect for biodiversity. These lines are intended to help de-articulate and disauthorize this current of thought and action that today dominates.

Human history cannot be separated from the expansion of many variables. We want to highlight two. On the one hand, Homo sapiens, thanks to enormous neurological development, has been able to develop culture as a powerful tool for adapting to many environments on Earth. On the other hand, this culture, especially that which has emerged in the West in recent centuries, has led to an increase in technological complexity and globalization, which has been made possible by the increasingly intensive exploitation of energy resources, without achieving the desired efficiencies. The evolution of our species includes the phases carried out with the main energy sources and with an increasing energy density, which has led to insane consumption in absolute and relative terms. If the energy consumption of a neolithic collector hunter was 2.3 kWh per day required for his body, the average European consumption is 74 kWh per day.

Thus, the state of abundance of goods and services in the first world is due to the availability of huge amounts of energy at a low price, by denying neoliberalism to assume the environmental, social and health externalities that this entails. The result of this deadly and interested unconsciousness is that our Earth, the only planet we have and that we will have available, is screaming us in the face; if we want to remain our refuge and support, we must remain in the conditions that are already moving away. We must therefore change our way of life.

This is reflected in the summary of the global environmental health and resource indicators. According to these indicators, we are on the threshold of the perfect storm, of the possible collapse of this civilization. And this must involve a transformation of production and consumption to build real sustainability. In other words, we must confront with conscience, progress and fairness the principle of sustainable growth, for the anatomy is a prevailing socio-economic system for all those who continue to think that it can and must continue to grow to infinity. Any of the early physics and biology courses know that this is not possible for any system. Some, under the hijacking of neoliberal dogmas and doctrines, plus the biblical order of growing, multiplying and dominating the earth, qualify this reality, although assured to the satiety of science, as a climate-environmental dogma. These voices aligned with the status quo warn us that if we accept rebate we run the risk of unacceptable impoverishment and not of curtailing our rights and freedoms.

Obviously, in addition to the teachings that history offers us, they do not listen to the hand of excellent works, such as the famous anthropologist Jared Diamond, who has researched and reasoned the success or collapse of many of our previous civilizations. It shows that many of them fell, resources (forests, soil, water, etc.) by ignorance or non-acceptance of the form of unsustainable exploitation.

Today is a global challenge, and paradoxically, our culture, until now, is the tool of biological adaptation of the human species to which we have referred at first, is at the most dramatic crossroads. Either it accepts and knows how to correct the situation, or it dramatically ensures its failure. Because it will inevitably touch us to live with little, but if we do it well and in time it does not mean that we have to live worse.

It is therefore necessary for all people to become aware of the VITAL NATURE, that our destiny is inseparable and of the need to act accordingly in all aspects of life, if we are to leave it. This includes, of course, the political and business class, but also all citizens. That obstacle should be above the political debate. On the other hand, it is symptomatic that all the long-lived peoples remaining on Earth have very clear dependency and their inseparable and inevitable relationship. This value has been lost in much of the current populations.

Many public managers who do not know or undervalue Earth’s operating laws are endangering our future through false beliefs and paradigms. Company management that does not take account of this and other environmental issues does not seem viable.

Any decision on technological alternatives should be based on the principles of environmental life cycle analysis and overall and social costs, taking into account the full life cycle of the products and services to be considered. This is still “rare”. It is a short-term disease, a continuous search for great and rapid benefits, whose social, economic and environmental externalities we pay among all. Today, in the Basque country itself and as far as renewable energies are concerned, these central issues that should necessarily be taken into account, even if it seems incredible, are also ignored by the Basque Government itself.

Advanced regulations on environmental impact and spatial planning do not apply comparatively because, if implemented, the locations for wind power plants would not progress. To end the dynamization of the framework, decrees and ad hoc laws are enacted to minimize the processing of environmental impact and reduce the decision of other administrations, and an additional proof is that these plants are unfeasible in the proposed scheme. In practice, for example, they have had no difficulty in imposing wind power plants, not even in the Natura 2000 Special Storage Areas.

And meanwhile, the judiciary is in limbo, and the opinion of many public officials involved is perfectly silenced and neutralized.

Citizen platforms protect the need for renewables, but require compliance with legal principles and administrative flows of environmental legislation and distributed and social dissemination. These platforms are accused of being enemies of unconsciousness and economic progress. Far from reality. For example, according to the claims made by the popular platform of Montes Libres de Álava to wind energy projects in the mountains, there are almost 35 strategies, plans and/or structural non-compliance essential to environmental legislation and/or spatial planning. These and other actions seek coherence in the deployment of renewables.

These popular and independent movements understand that we cannot allow industrialization and therefore the loss of more mountain areas for these activities. In short, exclusion zones should be declared. Citizens should know that there is nothing better to mitigate and adapt to climate change than to protect and maximize mature ecosystems, especially forest ecosystems.

In addition, case law has always spoken in favour of them when it comes to issues that wind power plants intended to invade and destroy. Verify that there are no environmental impact corrections resulting in the destruction caused by such projects. It is impossible to repair the damage caused by these industries in the mountains because they are no longer what they are. It is therefore necessary to place renewables in already man-made areas. The viability of this approach is demonstrated in strategies such as the first Plan of Milestones of the Provincial Council of Álava or the study of the implementation of solar energy of the Center of Environmental Studies of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

No one can expect it to emerge from this systemic social, economic and environmental crisis, without acknowledging that there is no fight against climate change, if it is not consistent with a determined and sustainable spatial planning that guarantees the greatest biodiversity and environmental resources necessary for the survival of the natural and, therefore, our own systems. Resources (drinking water, fertile soil, clean air, energy, materials, climate regulation, vital well-being, etc.) That Sánchez Galán himself, or Elón Muskiz, could not afford if we did. That is, for those who are not yet able to see the intrinsic value of Nature and only perceive the possible creative benefit of the one around it.

Finally, the anxiety we suffer has caused that from certain positions, in front of the mermaid songs that promise a more social expansion of these macrostructures, coincidence is initiated and, in some way, priority is given to the environmental variable. If we want to build a solid future for renewables, we have to take both dimensions into account. If so, it will also be possible to create economy, but this time for everyone.

We have a lot of work left.

Tempus

fugit…

The article has been developed by Montes Libres de Álava and is sponsored by: Adrián Almazán, Antonio Aretxabala, Dina Garzón, Alicia Puleo, Jorge Riechmann, Marta Tafalla, Antonio Turiel and Carmen Velayos.